Fresh water with 80% energy savings. Revolutionising desalination!

According to UNICEF, one in four people globally doesn’t have safe drinking water in their homes and nearly half the world’s population lacks safely managed sanitation. And according to the World Bank, in many of the hottest and driest regions across a hundred and fifty countries, desalination of seawater is the only thing keeping about three hundred million people alive. Now an Australian research team has come up with perhaps the simplest and cheapest way to produce fresh water yet. And the best part is, it requires less than 20% of the energy used in traditional desalination methods.

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[unvergebeneid]

0:19 "plenty of precipitation" ah yes, the two things the UK is famous for: plenty of precipitation and understatements.

[peterjol]

It's so hard to find quality factual channels like this one that It baffles me that this channel doesn't have millions of subscribers.

[neeosstuff]

One challenge I see is biologic fouling. Doing this on a desktop is a big difference than running continuously. To move this to a usable technology will require preventing everything from seaweed to barnacles from growing. Even a tiny amount of fouling will cause turbulent flow completely defeating the separation mechanism.

[bellshooter]

It's great to see recent innovations in desalination methods. As an Engineer who worked on power and desalination projects in Saudi, Qatar, Bahrain, and Libya, they were clearly relying on waste energy from power stations or industrial processes to provide thermal, multistage desalination. This is clearly better suited to lower technology areas the desperately need fresh water.

[teadrinker]

The fact that they didn't build an actual working unit that achieved sufficient desalination but it was only theoretical should serve as a dose of enthusiasm dramping reality.

[arthurkarg]

In reverse osmosis, the level of salinity is responsible for the necessary pressure. Means, with such a system upstream of an RO, the necessary pressure and related energy consumption of the RO could be reduced significantly! Sounds great!

[pauloquesado]

This just got me thinking on the miracles this can do if applied to the lithium extraction pools in Atacama desert, just passing the water in such structures on the early stages to increase the lithium concentration and recover some fresh water to local agricultural use instead of simply evaporating it

[tumbleddry]

I like how you focus on the incremental solutions that are being developed. We often forget about those initially, small, but significant solutions to problems like this...particularly as being a part of already existing technology. Yes, time is critical, but it'll be the low tech solutions that'll win the race...I'm convinced of that. Thank you for your commitment to finding and illuminating these technologies!

[dentonfender]

This technology along with recent discovery that light itself creates evaporation in water sounds like big progress, and huge savings in desalination.

[disky]

I was, just yesterday, wondering about the developments on this subject. I knew you'd have something to say about it. Thanks for reading my mind.

[clinthastings]

Couple of things:

1. It "sounds" to me like the cold plate in this type of system would have to be mechanically cleaned of precipitated salt particles on a fairly regular basis, yes/no?

2. Since they haven't actually constructed or tested an actual working Burgers cascade device yet, I'll have to take their "theoretical" 10% recovery rate stat with a grain of salt (no pun intended).

[spitfireresearchinc.]

More properly, this method reduces the amount of ELECTRICITY required to desalinate water, by trading some electrical energy for yet more heat energy. In terms of the ultimate thermodynamic efficiency, reverse osmosis is already achieving a separation efficiency of somewhere between 33% and 60%, meaning that it's using between 1/0.6 and 1/0.33 times as much energy as the thermodynamic minimum required to separate freshwater from seawater. That energy difference however is measured in joules, and there's no law of thermdodynamics that I'm aware of that requires the energy to be put into the system in the form of pure exergy (electricity) rather than in the form of some exergy and some heat. That's what this system does, and it might be useful- or not, depending on lots of things this video doesn't discuss, but which are very important to the at-scale feasibility of a desalination system.

Finally, "yield" goes to how much seawater you need to pump, and how salty the water is that you reject to the sea again. While a low yield would mean that you perhaps pump 10 m3 of water from the sea to get 1 m3 of freshwater and 9 m3 of slightly saltier water would need to be pumped back to the sea, that means you have to pump a lot of water around, and that doesn't happen without electrical energy being expended. RO normally concentrates seawater about two to three-fold. However, that salty water needs to be carefully controlled so that it doesn't cause a locally high salt content in the ocean which is damaging to sea life.

[fayebird]

Oneka technologies have a working wave energy powered desalinization plant which is sustainable and affordable .It works without external inputs, only the work of waves. It redistributes the excess salinity back to the ocean with no impacts to the surrounding sea. Fish and microscopic life are filtered at the input site. The osmosis membrane is cleansed by the process of the pump. This process is scalable in size to the project.
I wish the Aussies the best of success in their endeavors.

[CaedenV]

Even if this method doesn't get the job done, 2-3 passes like this before using other methods can have significant savings! Less power needed, and much longer lasting filters could be a game changer even for existing systems. Very interesting tech!

[Kevin_Street]

There's nothing I can add to this, since you've covered the topic quite completely. It does seem like the technology would work better as an add-on to existing desalination systems, improving their efficiency and reducing cost, rather than a complete system on its own. The 10% recovery rate makes this more of an in-development idea than a finished one that can help rural communities right away.

Desalination is a really fascinating subject, though! There's such a complex interplay of economics with engineering and basic science.

[wkeebfg]

One thing I love about camping out long term is gathering my water. Most of the usa water infrastructure is old. The disinfecting agents react with organic solids in the water and make a host of potent chemicals new to science. Better desalination is great, but I'm gonna try and stay in places with forested hills with streams in them to gather the little I need, avoid using water infrastructure in general whenever possible. I use an electric kettle right now parked behind a house and town water coats it with mineral sediment very quickly, stream water boils off clean. Tastes much better too, town water usually tastes horrible by comparison.

It's not that hard, I'm a poor hobo gardener living in a prius and I have gathered all my water this summer, including bathing. But not laundry, I take that to a laundromat. Using a wet rag makes it easy to wash up without using a lot of water. I could use the bathroom where I'm parked, but the forest is better, bathrooms are nasty.

So funny, I work as a gardener and rich people buy up all this amazing land in VT and then barely experience it. I am poor but I have so much rich experience with the soil and water of these properties. So much stream water has flowed through my body, I've breathed so much fresh air and touched rich soil and eaten plants from it. People buy land as a wealth flex and then continue to get everything they need from the machine, so silly.

[showme]

Great video and I love the lower energy achievement. In our case here in mid Wales we opted to go for rain water harvesting to help reduce our dependence on main water. I found that the IBC tanks used in the drinks industry are very cheap and widely available. So we have 4 of these one thousand litre tanks mounted low in the ground so as to allow a work top above them used for beddings to bring seedlings. Another 2 are sited down the side of the our home. Combined with the 4 water butts we have a storage capacity of 7 thousand litres. This has reduced our water consumption to half, and also means no cleaning was necessary other than some simple inline metal filters. we use the water for flushing the loo, watering plants, and cleanign the cars. Total cost including a pump and pressure tank and pipework £700. We save about £80 a year, so payback should be 9 years. This would make quite a considerable difference to our national water system, and its effects on our environment, if all homes were made this way.

[Kamodomon]

I really like the conclusion of this being a step forward to lead to perhaps a better method down the line. Good way to think of something like this.

[idt]

If storm runoff was captured, cleaned and stored, I'm guessing many of the water scarcity issues could be solved.

[peterpicroc]

ALL desalination produces an unpleasant byproduct- warm brine. It tends to cover the seabed in large areas next to desalination facilities and kill mostly everything. So while this new techique is as interesting as it is promising, desalination of seawater should be seen as a last resort when alternatives such as rainwater management, efficient irrigation, or wastewater recycling don't suffice.